Exploring Weak Signals to Design and Prototype for Emergent Futures

While technology and design have progressed greatly, they have also produced imbalances that affect the way we live and work. Additionally, they have also contributed to the use of the planet’s resources to fill our homes with unnecessary devices and objects. We must de-objectify and de-colonise the way we design technologies to make for more inclusive and diverse futures. One way to do that is to recognise our shortcomings and experiment with them in a way that is productive and promotes a more peaceful coexistence among living systems. This research explores the concept and practice of identifying these shortcomings via the “Atlas of Weak Signals”. The Atlas is a tool for combatting future challenges by actively creating opportunities for design interventions to dissolve the troubling problems of our times. In order to support this claim, we present and analyse a series of projects developed over the course of a master’s programme. Specific emphasis is placed on how the Atlas of Weak Signals was generated between students and faculty as a methodology to better understand the view of the world in which we live today from the one in which we design from. The projects are mapped in relation to emerging trends in both local and global contexts and the interconnections between these trends as generators of design opportunities. To conclude, we present the lessons we learned in the form of a toolkit so other design practitioners, researchers, teachers, and students can generate their own methods and tools.

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Fragility – Sustainability: Two Conflicting Major Challenges of this Twenty-First Century

Mercados y Negocios ◽

10.32870/myn.v0i39.7335 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 31-64

Author(s):

Demetrios Argyriades ◽

Pan Suk Kim

Keyword(s):

United Nations ◽

Great Recession ◽

Good Governance ◽

First Century ◽

Peaceful Coexistence ◽

Global Order ◽

The Great Recession ◽

The World ◽

Counter Culture ◽

The One

With the Great Recession receding, but crises still afflicting large swaths of the world and a climate of rampant distrust adversely affecting governance, it may be time to ask whether and, if so, how and where our field went wrong. Have we been willing victims of sleep-walkers using metaphors as models? This paper argues as much. Specifically, it contends that, foisted on the world as the one- size-fits-all prescription for good governance, nationally and internationally, it has ended turning governance and democracy on their heads, while also undermining the very foundations on which a global order, based on peaceful coexistence and constructive cooperation through the United Nations, was predicated. The prevalence of symptoms of hurt and discontent should lead us to conclude that the roots of our predicament and problems go much deeper, to a might counter- culture, which triumphed in the 1990s but still goes strong, in places.

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Meditation in the Classical Daoist Tradition

Asian Traditions of Meditation ◽

10.21313/hawaii/9780824855680.003.0010 ◽

2016 ◽

Author(s):

Harold D. Roth

Keyword(s):

The Body ◽

Cultivation Practices ◽

Teachers And Students ◽

The One ◽

The Way

The classical Daoist textual corpus, while often treated as abstract philosophy, emerged from a tradition of teachers and students that was primarily based on a common set of meditative techniques, and goals. These techniques emphasized proper posture (aligning the body and keeping it still), breath cultivation (concentrating, patterning, guiding, relaxing and expanding the breath), the use of attention (focusing on the one or on the center), as well as a variety of apophatic training regimes designed to restrict or eliminate desires, emotions, thoughts, knowledge and sense perceptions and reveal a deeper reality known as the Way, believed to underlie these faculties. With time, a tradition emerged for viewing these self-cultivation practices as particularly beneficial for rulership, connecting the ruler to a correlative web of cosmic energies.

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Ibn al-‘Arabi, Muhyi al-Din (1164–1240)

Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy ◽

10.4324/9780415249126-h022-1 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Neal Robinson

Keyword(s):

The Other ◽

Inner Experience ◽

Divine Essence ◽

The World ◽

The Subject ◽

The Creation ◽

One And Many ◽

The One ◽

Southeast Spain ◽

The Way

Ibn al-‘Arabi was a mystic who drew on the writings of Sufis, Islamic theologians and philosophers in order to elaborate a complex theosophical system akin to that of Plotinus. He was born in Murcia (in southeast Spain) in AH 560/ad 1164, and died in Damascus in AH 638/ad 1240. Of several hundred works attributed to him the most famous are al-Futuhat al-makkiyya (The Meccan Illuminations) and Fusus al-hikam (The Bezels of Wisdom). The Futuhat is an encyclopedic discussion of Islamic lore viewed from the perspective of the stages of the mystic path. It exists in two editions, both completed in Damascus – one in AH 629/ad 1231 and the other in AH 636/ad 1238 – but the work was conceived in Mecca many years earlier, in the course of a vision which Ibn al-‘Arabi experienced near the Kaaba, the cube-shaped House of God which Muslims visit on pilgrimage. Because of its length, this work has been relatively neglected. The Fusus, which is much shorter, comprises twenty-seven chapters named after prophets who epitomize different spiritual types. Ibn al-‘Arabi claimed that he received it directly from Muhammad, who appeared to him in Damascus in AH 627/ad 1229. It has been the subject of over forty commentaries. Although Ibn al-‘Arabi was primarily a mystic who believed that he possessed superior divinely-bestowed knowledge, his work is of interest to the philosopher because of the way in which he used philosophical terminology in an attempt to explain his inner experience. He held that whereas the divine Essence is absolutely unknowable, the cosmos as a whole is the locus of manifestation of all God’s attributes. Moreover, since these attributes require the creation for their expression, the One is continually driven to transform itself into Many. The goal of spiritual realization is therefore to penetrate beyond the exterior multiplicity of phenomena to a consciousness of what subsequent writers have termed the ‘unity of existence’. This entails the abolition of the ego or ‘passing away from self’ (fana’) in which one becomes aware of absolute unity, followed by ‘perpetuation’ (baqa’) in which one sees the world as at once One and Many, and one is able to see God in the creature and the creature in God.

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The Attributed to Aristotle

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199917389.013.1 ◽

2016 ◽

Author(s):

Cristina D'Ancona

Keyword(s):

Causal Chain ◽

First Principle ◽

The World ◽

Great Chain Of Being ◽

First Cause ◽

The One ◽

The Way

The pseudo-Theology of Aristotle is the most important example of the exposure of the cultivated Arab readership to Neoplatonism in Aristotle’s garb. Plotinus’s doctrines are construed as the exposition genuinely made by Aristotle himself. Plotinus’s One and Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover merge, and the Plotinian principles Intellect and Soul are endowed with the task of letting the power of the First Cause expand until it reaches the world of coming-to-be and passing away. The great chain of being has its beginning in the First Principle: the One, the Pure Being, and Pure Good: every degree depends on it, and its power reaches the sublunar beings through the medium of Intellect and Soul. This causal chain is dominated by the pattern of the double journey of the soul, the way down along the necessary declension of the degrees of being, and the way back toward its homeland.

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Voegelin and Aristotle on Nous: What is Noetic Political Science?

The Review of Politics ◽

10.1017/s0034670500031612 ◽

2002 ◽

Vol 64 (1) ◽

pp. 57-79 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

David D. Corey

Keyword(s):

Political Science ◽

First Principles ◽

Sense Perception ◽

Human Consciousness ◽

The World ◽

Divine Activity ◽

Eric Voegelin ◽

The One ◽

The Way ◽

First Philosophy

The article examines Voegelin's understanding of nous as the ground for theorizing, and relates this back to Aristotle. Aristotle is shown to have understood the activities of nous in two distinct ways. On the one hand, nous is the divine activity of the soul exploring its own ground. But nous is also induction (epagôgê) of the first principles of science through sense perception, memory and experience. The two basic activities of nous are related, but they have different values when it comes to the world of particulars. The argument is that a substantive ethical and political science—one that sheds light on particulars—must include the inductive employment of nous and that the exclusion of this from Voegelin's political science results in some discernible limitations.The limitations of Eric Voegelin—s work are sometimes difficult to keep in view, particularly while he is expounding upon the totality of Being, the myriad dimensions of human consciousness, and the nature of order in personal, social, and historical existence. But in fact Voegelin's work is more limited than his magisterial tone might suggest. The argument of this article is that while Voegelin offers his readers profoundly important insights into the structure of human consciousness and into what Aristotle called first philosophy, the study of being qua being, he does not offer his readers much in the way of a substantive ethical or political science.

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Ethics, Science, and Poetry

The Radical Demand in Løgstrup's Ethics ◽

10.1093/oso/9780198829027.003.0005 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 104-144

Author(s):

Robert Stern

Keyword(s):

The Other ◽

Scientific Thinking ◽

Normative Authority ◽

The World ◽

The One ◽

Ethical Demand ◽

The Way

This chapter covers Chapters 10 and 11 of The Ethical Demand, which focus on how Løgstrup sees the demand in relation to science on the one hand, and poetry on the other. In relation to science, Løgstrup argues for a form of philosophy that might be seen to challenge the ‘anti-metaphysical’ assumptions of scientific thinking, particularly in the way his account attributes a kind of normative authority to the demand as standing in judgement over our actions. Løgstrup also considers how far certain kinds of scientific determinism might pose a challenge to ethics, arguing that this challenge can be resisted. In Chapter 11, Løgstrup asks whether poetry can have implications for ethics, suggesting poetry can break through the triviality in which our lives are often lived, thus making us properly attentive to the world that surrounds us, including other people.

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The Verisimilitudinarian approach to ‘the Truth’

Perspectives ◽

10.1515/pipjp-2017-0004 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 7 (1) ◽

pp. 32-39

Author(s):

Andrea Roselli

Keyword(s):

Scientific Progress ◽

Main Argument ◽

Scientific Theories ◽

The World ◽

Epistemic Notion ◽

The One ◽

The Way

AbstractThe Verisimilitudinarian approach to scientific progress (VS, for short) is traditionally considered a realist-correspondist model to explain the proximity of our best scientific theories to the way things really are in the world out there (ʻthe Truthʻ, with the capital ʻtʻ). However, VS is based on notions, such as ʻestimated verisimilitudeʻ or ʻapproximate truthʻ, that dilute the model in a functionalist-like theory. My thesis, then, is that VS tries to incorporate notions, such as ʻprogressʻ, in a pre-constituted metaphysical conception of the world, but fails in providing a fitting framework. The main argument that I will develop to support this claim is that the notions that they use to explain scientific progress (ʻestimated verisimilitudeʻ or ʻapproximate truthʻ) have nothing to do with ʻthe Truthʻ. After presenting Cevolani and Tamboloʻs answer (2013) to Birdʻs arguments (2007), I will claim that VS sacrifices the realist-correspondist truth in favor of an epistemic notion of truth, which can obviously be compatible with certain kinds of realism but not with the one the authors have in mind (the correspondence between our theories and the way things really are).

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What J.T. Fraser Gave the World

KronoScope ◽

10.1163/15685241-12341289 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 14 (1) ◽

pp. 25-34

Author(s):

Frederick Turner

Keyword(s):

Elements in the thought of Plotinus at variance with Classical Intellectualism

The Journal of Hellenic Studies ◽

10.2307/631449 ◽

1973 ◽

Vol 93 ◽

pp. 13-22

Author(s):

A. Hilary Armstrong

Keyword(s):

Systematic Account ◽

The World ◽

The One ◽

The Universe ◽

The Way

Plotinus is, up to a point, a classical intellectualist in the manner of Aristotle, and, he would himself have certainly thought, of Plato. He professes, that is, to give an account of everything that is in any degree real in the universe (and even a kind of account of the unreal) which is certainly and unchangingly true and can be demonstrated to be so by rational processes. This account culminates in the description of an eternal realm of intelligible intellect which can be (and indeed really always is) our own, certainly and imperturbably possessed. This systematic account of reality, as is well known, breaks down, and we have to break out of it, in a very startling way at the top. Beyond the Platonic-Aristotelian Intellect-Intelligible, the world of real being which is Νοῦς and νοητά, lies the One or Good beyond being, which is neither intelligent nor intelligible. When we have completed our understanding of reality, we have to leave it all behind in order to find what turns out to be the only thing we want, the source of all values and the goal of all desire, which alone makes it worth the effort to attain to Νοῦς on the way, as it is the only reason why Νοῦς is there at all.

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Gregory of Nyssa on the Metaphysics of the Trinity (with Reference to his Letter To Ablabius)

10.1093/oso/9780198826422.003.0012 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Anna Marmodoro

Keyword(s):

Philosophical Problem ◽

Gregory Of Nyssa ◽

The World ◽

One And Many ◽

The One ◽

The Trinity ◽

Special Case ◽

The Way

This chapter explores Gregory’s metaphysics of the Trinity, which used an innovative distinction between stuffs (e.g. gold), which cannot be counted, and individuals (e.g. rings), which can. Gregory identifies the nature of any kind with the totality of its instances: the nature of man is the totality of men; the nature of gold is the totality of gold. For Gregory, the totality is more ‘real’ than the individuals into which it is articulated, which are merely the way in which the kind is present in the world. God is then identified as the total quantity of divinity in the world, and is thus one, and real. The Persons of the Trinity into which God is articulated are the ways God is in the world, and can be comprehended by us. Thus, the problem of the Trinity is solved as a special case of the philosophical problem of the One and Many.

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